By Nelson Schneider - 01/24/26 at 04:21 PM CT
Originally announced right before the end of 2025 during the Holiday Rush, GOG looks like it will be undergoing some big changes in the near future. According to the DRM-free game platform’s site and various Gaming news outlets, one of GOG’s original co-founders, a Polack named Michal Kicinski, will be taking GOG off CD Projekt’s hands and taking the platform fully private once again.
I can’t help but be somewhat excited about this move, as all of the blog-worthy headlines we’ve had out of GOG for the last... half-decade at least, has been about how the company is betraying its founding principles, going Woke, getting into bed with Amazon, begging for donations, etc. Anyone who has been paying attention and can follow basic pattern recognition and logic understands that a huge part of the reason why Steam is so dominant in the digital game sales space is the fact that it’s an entirely private company, with no shareholders or Venture Capital firms that it must please. Instead, Valve’s entire purpose with Steam has been to please the users – and navigate the minefield of European Commission regulations, but that’s secondary. If GOG wants to compete with Steam on an even footing, it can’t be beholden to shareholders demanding dividends, compliance with ESG laws, or the crushing influence of an Industrial Gaming ecosystem that has been slowly undermining itself for a decade and is now on the precipice of a full-on collapse.
It’s still a mystery what Mr. Kicinski will do to right the ship, as GOG’s many glaring problems have been allowed to accumulate under CD Projekt for quite some time. Releasing fully-uncensored versions of games that offend Communist Chinese and Woke sensibilities would be a good step, as would putting effort into polishing up the code in the GOG Galaxy Optional Client so it doesn’t crash and glitch-out all the time. Aggressively laying claim to distribution rights for old abandonware games, aggressively seducing “AAA” publishers with the truth about how DRM doesn’t actually lead to more sales, and leading the way in irresistibly-deep discounts during sales would also be good steps.
In short, GOG has the best opportunity to compete with Steam under their new private ownership paradigm that they’ve had since their founding back in 2007. Steam may be the behemoth with dominant market share, but that makes it the biggest target for litigation and overweening regulatory compliance. If GOG, as a smaller company, can be nimble and pick up some of the slack that Valve has been forced to leave by its business partners, they have a real chance to rise like the Phoenix of legend and demonstrate that Steam is, indeed, not a monopoly. And if GOG’s new leadership can do all of this without compromising the company’s founding principles, it will be a stick-in-the-eye to all the wannabe publishers with their expensive, DRM-laden storefronts, who may be forced to take a second look at the definition of “customer service” as their own businesses collapse down around them.
